Mother’s education and female child survival: An empirical study from India

In India, child mortality rates for girls are much higher than those for boys, indicating discrimination against girls in the intra-household allocation of resources. In addition, overall child mortality rates remain high in many parts of the country. This paper attempts to understand important predictors of both child and excessive female child mortality in India, with a focus on variables relating to maternal agency and education. Attempts are made to isolate the precise channels through which mother’s education influences survival probabilities of children, particularly, girls in India. Overall education effects are decomposed into autonomy, information and other effects and then regressed on child and excessive female child mortality variables in India. It is found that while information effects of education are important in both child mortality and excess female child mortality regressions; autonomy enhancing effects of education are much more important in predicting excess female child mortality than child mortality as a whole. In addition, even after controlling for autonomy and information effects, education significantly and negatively affects both child and excessive female child mortality, indicating that other direct benefits of education (beyond information and autonomy) are important. These results have interesting social and policy implications and indicate several promising lines of research. JEL codes: I 12, I 20, J 13, J 16